Discord was down for thousands over Cloudflare issue

Updated on: 15 November 2023

Gintaras Radauskas
Senior journalist

Image by Shutterstock.

Discord, the popular instant messenger, faced a serious outage on Friday, with thousands of users getting a “Sorry, you have been blocked” message.

Users were reporting left and right that they were unable to log into their Discord account. Instead, they saw the aforementioned message about being blocked.

“I was blocked but don't know the reason why I was banned. I haven't said anything to my memory that is against the guidelines, if so please let me know. If it is a mistake, I would like to have it unblocked quickly,” wrote one anxious redditor.

blocked-discord — A message seen by thousands of Discord users on Friday. Image by Cybernews.

Users who were actually able to log in couldn’t smoothly access their chats and message history.

Discord’s official status page indicated that the company was aware of the error and an abnormal rise in API (Application Programming Interface) errors, while DownDetector, a website that tracks outages, also showed a significant spike in outage reports for Discord.

down-discord — Downdetector showed an increase of Discord outages reported. Image by Cybernews.

However, users soon noticed that the outage appeared to be affecting only the web and desktop apps – the mobile Discord app was functioning normally. That meant that no accounts were actually blocked for violating the platform’s policies.

Many users guessed that the issue was related to Cloudflare, a content delivery network and cloud security platform – the same one that sent the “Sorry, you have been blocked” message.”

Cloudflare also experienced and reported issues with its Dashboard and API service, but that’s probably because it had scheduled maintenance of its data center in Doha for Thursday and Friday.

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Soon, both Discord and Cloudflare said that the issues were resolved. “A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results,” Discord said, and users started reporting that they have been able to regain access to their accounts.

Discord, an instant messaging and call platform, was released in 2015 and has proven particularly popular with gamers – which would explain the panicked frenzy over the relatively short outage on Friday.

Most recently, Discord entered mainstream headlines in April 2023 when 21-year-old Jack Teixeira was accused of leaking a trove of classified US documents to a closed Discord community.

Discord was down for thousands, outage related to Cloudflare

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